Arguments for and against the Masquerade

I'm currently in the process of planning out a webcomic that takes place in a Wizarding School (get the Harry Potter jokes out of the way now, folks), and my idea for the villains is an organization working to break The Masquerade (called the Veil in-story) and reveal the existence of magic to the world, while the heroes are trying to stop them. One thing I really want to do with the story is emphasize that neither side is really "wrong", so I want both of them to have decent arguments on whether to keep or ditch the Veil.

So I'm asking: what could some of those reasons be? Ideas I have for why to keep the Veil include the possibility that the Muggle population will see the magical community as a threat and start hunting down mages, and arguments for breaking the Veil might include how the world could be improved by combining the magic and mundane (for example, think of how many lives could be saved if hospitals had access to healing spells), but I want to know what you guys think.

i think a reason for a masquerade to be put in place is to maintain the freedom of the mages, and to keep government pressure off everyones back.

come out with magic and people will want to start having it used in their favor. wherever the academy is built, i assume the moment the masquerade fails and their existance becomes known, whatever country they've built their academy on is going to be very quick to start putting on the pressure. stuff like evading taxes, the probability of a significant number of students not having citizenship of said country (probably more likely to be a thing in countries reeling from a terrorist threat) or just generally the possibility of being a danger to muggles, all of that could probably be used to put mages under the thumb of the government, which is reason enough for mages to want to keep their existance hidden.

witch-hunts...probably shouldnt happen if this takes place in the 21st century+. widespread defamation and general negative rumormonging made particularly easy through the internet, thats more likely than unruly mobs with pitchforks out to physically attack mages, having no ounce of self-preservation...

edited 24th Aug '14 8:23:19 PM by Tarsen

re witch hunts: If this were set in any setting based on Earth, then "Magic is Evil" in some form or other will exist in the minds of a subset of humanity.

I've personally met people who think hypnotism is an evil created by the Devil and that The Power Of Christ can stop such evil acts being committed.

I have also encountered those who deem Wiccans and other pagans to be "in league with the Devil", "worshipping demons" etc.

So there would be people, of various religious backgrounds, who would view actual obviously working spellcraft to be "of evil origin" and a subset of those may well resort to violence, up to and including murder.

The 21st Century is not as "enlightened" as people like to believe.

ah.

i was thinking less "enlightened" and more "different approach to being stupid" but apparantly we've just added to ways of being stupid.

edited 24th Aug '14 8:52:34 PM by Tarsen

The fear of witch hunts only works if mages aren't all that powerful. If you make their magic strong enough, you'd have to wonder why they'd be afraid of Muggles.

Mahou Sensei Negima had a plotline similar to this where the people trying to break and preserve the masquerade were both portrayed in a positive light. The folks trying to break the masquerade point out how much wizards could help with the world problems if they didn't have to worry about staying a secret. The people trying to preserve the masquerade point out that most mages live in the Magical World under the authority of mage-run governments, and those governments are sufficiently isolationist that, if the masquerade were broken, they'd order all mages on Earth to retreat to the Magical World and then cut off all imigration to or from Earth, leaving Earth with no magical assistance at all.

Or you could just go with the idea that magic can be incredibly dangerous, and if all 7 billion people on Earth suddenly found out magic was real, there would be so many people trying to cast magical spells, and botching them horribly, that the results could be catastrophic. In that scenario, it's not so much that breaking the masquerade is a bad idea; it's just that you'd need to have a worldwide education initiative in place to keep people from blowing their homes up with a carpet-cleaning spell.

Still, the number of people who'd run old-school witch hunts has gone down considerably (particularly in the Northern US). There was maybe a time once when that nutball Baptist Church would've been seen as a 'fringe but still Christian' organization - that time has passed.

Maple Samurai, I think the best route to take here would be a capitalist one: what good can the Maygi do, and what ill can they do, and most importantly who profits from it?

Or this: the whole point of the Veil is to keep a secret, right? Well why was it put up in the first place?

We had a discussion along these lines here, but that went more towards military applications than civilian ones for the Maygi.

Are you familiar with Watchmen at all? One of Dr. Manhattan's many uses outside of being a one-man strategic weapon was to synthesize enough materials for batteries to provide all Americans with electric cars - would that Wizarding School of yours have an alchemical department that would suddenly become very useful for making the rare-earth materials needed in solar panels?

I think you could make the good guys be in favor of keeping magic an 'art', while the bad guys want to profit from turning it into a means of industrial productions.

edited 24th Aug '14 10:41:42 PM by DeusDenuo

The traditional reason for the masquerade is that the muggles would wipe out the supernaturals if they knew about them. But what if that wasn't the case?

Imagine a world where the supernaturals would be quite capable of holding their own against the muggles. They'd even be able to rule if they showed themselves openly.

They just don't want to. They want nothing to do with the muggle world that they perceive as crude, primitive and hopelessly gullible. The reason for the masquerade isn't survival...it's privacy. And a hefty dose of arrogance.

That gives you some interesting variants on the masquerade-or-not debate. There could be a mage faction who wants to break the masquerade because they genuinely believe in peaceful coexistence with the muggles, or another one that thinks they should take over the world...for the muggles' own good, of course, since they're obviously incapable of properly governing themselves. And there might very well be significant overlap between these. Their opponents, then, could be made up of isolationists and xenophobes...and people who believe in a magical Prime Directive, figuring that intervening in the muggle world isn't going to end well for anybody.

I personally hate the trend of super powered and arrogant magic-wielders.

There are plenty of people who'd enforce a masquerade for very simple reasons:

1) They want to be left alone (by non-magic users). Masquerade = no lines of people clamoring for help AND no witch-hunts.

2) They don't have to worry about tons of laws. The United States has dozens of variations on country-wide laws, several states have weird leftover/odd laws, and California apparently has the most obtuse and weird cosmetology laws EVER (I've been thinking of getting a cosmetology degree and they have about fifty legal hoops to jump through after getting your degree). I can easily see the pro-Masquerade people going "yeah, just don't be a dick and use common sense around Muggles, and we'll be fine."

edited 25th Aug '14 10:40:29 PM by Sharysa

Agreed, on the 'arrogant wizard guy' trope. (Seriously, it rivals Arrogant Kung-Fu Guy in usage.)

Hm... what about this? Power corrupts, and the reason for the masquerade is to keep the easily-corrupted away from The Power. Only those with the proper training (the students) can use it properly without going off the deep end, but the Wizarding School is A) the only one of its kind and B) really selective about who it accepts as students.

Well, I'm pleasantly surprised I got this much input for my question. I appreciate it, guys.

For the "government finding out" argument, my original idea for the comic is that the government is in on The Veil, like in Harry Potter but now I'm tempted to make it otherwise, because Tarsen brings up a LOT of points on why the magical community would want to self-govern and leave mundane governments in the dark about their existence.

And yes, memories of The Burning Times are still fresh in the magical world's collective psyche (helps that it includes several long-lived individuals and species), and no one in it likes they idea of being hunted down by lynch mobs, which seem like an all too real possibility for those that live in religiously conservative areas.

Answering Raven Wilder's question about how powerful mages are, it depends on the individual. The most common mages are hedge wizards who only did well enough back in magic school to graduate and can cast a few spells at most, but some of the more powerful ones can fight off a well-armed SWAT team if pushed. While individuals who can waste entire armies do exist, they are few and far between. Also, that Negima comparison pretty much sums up the anti-Masquerade faction's worldview in a nutshell. Also, humans that don't possess "the Gift" can't cast spells on their own, but Device Magic is always an option, which in-story can also go horribly awry if you don't know what you're doing, so your botched carpet-cleaning spell analogy still works.

Yes, I have read Watchmen, and there are many potential industrial and military uses for magic in my story, which could come into play if I decide to do The Unmasqued World trope. Perhaps a possible pro-Masquerade argument could be the fear that mages could be conscripted for military service?

Matt Striker, neither magic or science is superior to the other in my story. In fact, should an all-out Magic Technology War break out, both sides would match each other blow for blow. Fully-trained Marine corps could be matched by easily summoned hordes of demons. Dragons can go toe to toe with fighter jets and helicopter gunships. For every tank in the mundane army, there's a guy in the magical army who can throw fireballs and lightning bolts. And if the Muggles break out the nuclear option, then there's always a minor Eldritch Abomination that's one summoning circle away from levelling whatever metropolis its summoner points it at.

And funny thing, Sharysa, an earlier draft of the story (I've been jotting down ideas for this on and off since I was in high school), the main villain actually was an arrogant mage supremacist, but then I got the idea for him being an anti-Masquerade Well-Intentioned Extremist, which I ended up liking better, which is how I got to the idea that started this thread.

edited 29th Aug '14 2:10:19 PM by MapleSamurai

There's another possibility: that magic depends on belief, and in the presence of enough people with a scientific education, open explicit magic simply doesnt work (this is called the "Goat Effect" and is a supposedly real thing from research into psychic phenomena). The only way to make it work is to disguise it as a natural phenomenon. You can change the weather, but only in a way that could conceivably have happened anyway, according to most people's understanding of meteorology. You can summon the dead, but only if there are no "unbelievers" present. Fireballs against tanks is right out.

As an added bonus, this could be used to explain why magic is reported less often now than in the past (the Enlightenment happened) and why wizards stay well away from church congregations.

BTW- this idea was one basis of the RPG Mage: The Ascension.

One of the basic arguments of a Masquerade's problem is that it's essentially a conspiracy theory; it requires hundreds of people to march in lockstep executing hypercompetent and even literally prescient/omniscent plans to survive.

Or, alternately and for the sake of simplicity, it's the magic system itself that causes the masquerade.

Basically what I was suggesting.

I'll admit that's an interesting idea, but I have a very different magic system written for the story, and to be honest, I'm not interested in crafting a Masquerade that's impossible to break anyway.

• RANT ALERT!

From what I've read on these forums, the prevailing opinion seems to be that any story that uses The Masquerade without is some kind of hack work, because it's unrealistic, no one could keep it up, etc. I won't deny that Masquerades require a lot of suspension of disbelief, but so do a lot of tropes. At the end of the day, Tropes Are Tools, and while some tools are better for some jobs than others, at the end of the day, it's the quality of the work that matters the most. Take The Dresden Files for example. That series has the most ridiculously Extra-Strength Masquerade imaginable (zombie dinosaurs, anyone?), but the series isn't bad, because its richly fleshed-out characters and world more than makes up for it. That's not to say I think my story will be a masterpiece, but if it turns out bad, it will be because I didn't write it very well, not because I had Masquerade in it. In my story, The Masquerade works, but it's not infallible. The villains making an Unmasqued World is a definite possibility, a possibility my heroes are trying to avoid. So if I made it so overt magic doesn't work around mundanes or that each time they see something magic completely forget about it without exception, then I don't have a plot anymore. So while, again, it's a neat idea, and I'm sure it's implemented well in Mage, it's not something I'm interested in writing, and if I'm writing a story I'm not interested in, I might as well not write it at all.

• RANT OVER

Sorry, I just had to get that off my chest.

edited 29th Aug '14 2:38:49 PM by MapleSamurai

I was, too, a bit surprised to find how much hate The Masquerade gets on this site. It might be that the trope is a bit overdone, but you have to remember that in the end Tropes Are Not Bad. This goes doubly with tropes like The Masquerade, which is essentially a Necessary Weasel for a specific fantasy subgenre.

The Masquerade might require some extra Willing Suspension of Disbelief on the reader's side, but it's the only way to implement fantastic elements into our world without changing it drastically. Otherwise you'd have to go with some kind of alternate history/universe stuff, which destroys the very alluring fantasy that something like magic could exist in our world.

I also disagree that the writer is somehow obligated to justify the existence of The Masquerade. As long as the work doesn't take itself too seriously, you can get away with anything (and in works like Men in Black the whole point is to play with the implausibility of Conspiracy Theories). Going with an Extra-Strength Masquerade can make the story a bit easier to swallow, but in the end The Masquerade is just a building block for a certain type of fantasy story. If that's the kind of story you want to write, then go for it.

edited 29th Aug '14 6:11:52 PM by Paradisesnake

Tropes Are Not Bad, yes - but they're being used by Tropers. (And for all the hate the trope is supposed to be getting, why is there so little of it in this discussion?)

I'd say it's an obligation, just as much as any other element in a story needs to 'make sense' in order to swallow it. It just needs to make sense in the story's version of physics - you can have a ball accelerate downward more slowly than 9.8 m/s, but you still owe your audience an explanation, and The Masquerade is no different. It doesn't need to be very long, but it does need to be present.

id say theres so little hate for the maskraid because the most vocal people more frequently appear in the writers block sub-forum.

i remember the last maskraid thread getting very long and very shouty.

my only real problem with it is how bothersome it is to spell.

edited 2nd Sep '14 12:06:25 PM by Tarsen

& I was mainly referring to The Masquerade: tired cliche or inevitable reality? thread, where the issue is discussed pretty thoroughly.

Well sure, there needs to be some explanation, but if the way The Masquerade is held up is not the focus of the work, then there's really no point in putting too much effort in building up one.

For example, if you look at stories like Harry Potter, you'll notice that different ways of hiding the magical world from Muggles are mentioned every now and then, yet the danger of them finding out the truth is never really discussed. This is because Harry Potter isn't about a conflict between wizards and non-wizards, but between wizards themselves.

edited 2nd Sep '14 1:34:54 PM by Paradisesnake